Do Italian factives entail their presuppositions? Yes, but...

Abstract

Factive predicates are at the nexus of two challenging topics that are central for a theory of how natural language is understood in context. They syntactically embed clausal complements and semantically express attitudes towards propositional content. Importantly, the content of their complement clause is generally assumed to be presupposed. From the very beginning, it has been clear that there is an additional complication in terms of apparent variation between factive predicates. The present paper reports experimental data relating two recent approaches to variation among factives to one another. These two approaches apply a roughly parallel theoretical approach to separate empirical domains. The core theoretical notion is that the presupposition of factives may or may not simultaneously be part of the entailed content for a given factive verb. Chierchia (2016) puts this notion to use to explain variation in NPI-licensing of factives in English and Italian. Djärv, Zehr & Schwarz (2017) present experimental evidence for differences between cognitive and emotive factives in English, which they also explain based on this notion. The natural next move in an attempt to integrate these works is to extend the experimental paradigm from the latter to Italian, which is what we do in this paper. Overall, the results for Italian do not exhibit the differences from English that we would expect given the two proposals. They thus pose a challenge for maintaining a uniform theoretical approach to the two sets of empirical observations. We consider some potential avenues for understanding the full set of data theoretically, but have to leave a resolution of the theoretical conundrum for future work.